His dreams had always been Houdiniesque: they were the dreams of a pupa struggling in its blind cocoon, mad for a taste of light and air.

The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.

Forget about what you are escaping from. Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to.

The things I keep going back to, rereading, maybe they say more about me as a reader than about the books. Love in the Time of Cholera, Pale Fire.

Undressing her was an act of recklessness, a kind of vandalism, like releasing a zoo full of animals, or blowing up a dam.

Take care-there is no force more powerful than that of an unbridled imagination.

A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.

Man makes plans . . . and God laughs.

My Saturday Night. My Saturday night is like a microwave burrito. Very tough to ruin something that starts out so bad to begin with.

Anything good that I have written has, at some point during its composition, left me feeling uneasy and afraid. It has seemed, for a moment at least, to put me at risk.

It's always been hard for me to tell the difference between denial and what used to be known as hope.

See mirror, every time you will miss me and look deeper into your eyes till you will find me.

A mind that searches for answers to big questions is a mind that will discover incredible things.

Holding on to weight (i.e. anger, bitterness, the past, hatred) will not only hold you back, but also block your blessings. You've got to let some things go to move forward.

The black population now consists of two distinct classes-the middle class and the poor.

We have to be much tougher. We have to be much stronger than we've been.

Love is when you give someone else the power to destroy you, and you trust them not to do it.

Show more interest in their story than your own.

It's so interesting to me how songs take on a shape and body of their own and grow.

Leave home? It's quite a scary thought. I'm not the most independent person and that's the result. When you're always surrounded by people it becomes quite normal.

A bearer of news of death appears to himself as very important. His feeling - even against all reason - makes him a messenger from the realm of the dead.